Chapter 12
CHAPTER
TWELVE
PHOENIX
“When are you going to get tired of your new toy?” Cutter’s question came out bitter, and it jerked my attention away from Aubrey.
He was standing by Blythe, a look of curiosity on his face that I was pretty sure he didn’t realize he was showing while he watched her carefully carve a piece of wood he’d brought back from our explorations.
There were trees here with nearly white bark, and she was making quick work of turning it into what looked like a bear.
Funny.
My eyes narrowed as Cutter crossed his arms—he was actually a few years older than me, and you’d think twenty-three would be enough time on this fucked up planet to know when he was picking a fight he couldn’t win.
I didn’t have patience for stupid questions, and I didn’t run the pack with gentle parenting .
I did it with strength, with power. With the viciousness to keep everyone safe and get us through the storms.
And right now, I was seriously tempted to throw Cutter into the rain. Maybe that’s what it was, though. It had been weeks since we’d had a proper storm. We’d been at the resort for at least eight days, and there’d been nothing.
Not a cloud in the sky.
The only thing that got wet was Aubrey’s ass when I came inside him every night after we’d been out fighting and clearing the immediate area around us.
It was slow, hard work, partially because the ex-Order soldier working alongside me insisted we be thorough , and that we actually clean up the areas we were in before we left them.
It was like he was chasing the phantom image of what Paradise used to be and trying to catch it with desperate fingers.
“Does it fucking matter?” I finally growled out an answer, and Cutter frowned. I didn’t miss the way his hand reached up, tugging at the collar on his throat. I was tempted to rip the damn thing off him.
“You don’t get attached. You told me that.”
I had. I’d made it pretty clear that he and I had only been fucking, and it wasn’t something I planned on making permanent.
He was there, and his mouth was hot, and every other person in the group that I’d had sex with hadn’t made it a thing.
Desire and need, the primal urges that ran through our veins like the rain in the sky… it wasn’t supposed to mean anything.
So I wasn’t sure why he was still so caught up on it.
“Phoenix…”
“Listen.” My tone was probably a little harsher than it should have been, and I raised my hand, hooking one finger through the metal at his throat so I could pull him closer.
It made him gasp, made his eyes widen. “I fuck who I want, when I want. We don’t get hangups, and we don’t let that shit fuck with what we are.
Fucking is just fucking, Cutter. I’ll sleep with Aubrey until I’m tired of it. ”
I pushed him away, and I didn’t miss the hurt that ran through his expression before he hardened his gaze.
“Yeah. I forgot, you’re nothing but an animal, right, Phoenix?”
I grinned at him, bumping my fist against his shoulder in an attempt to take a bit of the sting out from earlier. Maybe he was older than me, but sometimes he seemed so young. “All teeth.”
When I turned my eyes back to Aubrey, he was staring at me, and if I wasn’t mistaken, there was a hint of irritation in his gaze.
Why in the fuck did that make something in my chest warm when I’d been ready to tear Cutter’s head off three seconds earlier for being jealous?
We were on the other side of the resort, clearing out what looked like it used to be a little theme park, when we heard them. It was a low growl at first, followed by another, and another.
“Shit.” Aubrey’s voice didn’t have to sound so excited as he rounded the corner, but I could see it in his eyes—the same spark that danced through his expression when I held him down and fucked him until he was nearly catatonic. “How many do you think?”
I paused to listen. From the sound of it, there were at least five or six. I wasn’t really worried about the numbers. In the days we’d been clearing things out, we’d run into more than a few groups of them. We’d barely gotten through a third of the resort.
The assholes who’d been here before us were shit at securing their perimeter.
As soon as the first rabid rounded the corner, we started moving.
They were disgusting . Sometimes the ones who attacked us looked human, maybe with blood a little darker than it should have been and insanity creeping across their features, but these…
These were fat, slightly bloated. Rotted, like they’d been sitting in water and had crawled out to bake in the sun.
They came for us with the same speed as the others, running fast enough that I felt my adrenaline spike.
The promise of violence pushed me forward, and like we could somehow read one another from movement alone, Aubrey took the three on the left while I turned and swung on the ones to our right.
My axe took one across the stomach, and I had to jerk back to avoid the putrid wave of intestines and thicker things that poured across the ground when I wrenched the metal free.
It didn’t seem to stop it, though—the red rain made all infected have a single drive, one purpose.
Kill.
The rage on its face was clear, and I didn’t hesitate to bring the handle of my axe up, flipping it over to the blunt side so I could smash its skull in.
I took a brief second to glance at Aubrey. He had a knife in his hand, and he was making quick work of carving the infected in front of him up into ribbons, cutting at tendons to make the thing stumble and using that momentum to slam the blade into the socket of its eye.
Fuck, he was perfect when he fought—elegant, like he was dancing instead of killing. It was a choreographed defiance of death, and he knew every step. The feel of nails raking against my arm tore me away from the show, and I took my anger at the interruption out on the bastards in my line of sight.
As I finished the rest of mine off, I turned just in time to watch Aubrey pull out his pistol and shove it into the open mouth of the infected trying to bite at his throat. The sound of the shot was muffled when he pulled the trigger.
“Good fucking job.”
Aubrey pushed the dead weight of the body away from him with a breathless laugh.
His eyes were sparkling as he turned, holstering his gun and yanking the knife he’d used out of the eye of another infected to clean it.
It was so gorgeous, the unabashed emotion that ran through his gaze when he didn’t realize he was letting it bleed through.
It was proof that there was an entire part of him he was keeping locked away behind the pain I gave him, beneath the facade he wore.
There were pieces of Aubrey that I only caught a glimpse of when his eyes were unguarded, unshuttered. In those moments, I could peer through the windows and see that once upon a time he’d been full of life.
Full of hope.
Full of a will to live .
“That was amazing.” He was smiling when he stood and started forward, and his fingers skimmed over the scratch on my arm. The rabid hadn’t broken skin, so there was no need to patch it up, and no worry that this time would be the time it changed me.
Still, when he flattened his hand against my bicep and the warmth of his palm penetrated my skin, I let out a soft exhalation of pleasure.
It had been a little over a week of us fighting and fucking and only getting to know one another by how well we killed together and how hard I could make Aubrey come… but casual touches?
I didn’t get many of those.
I raised my hand, and he let me use my thumb to wipe a streak of blood from his cheek—he even leaned into the touch for a second before he realized what he was doing and pulled away.
I understood. I always wanted to fuck after I fought.
I hadn’t realized it was just as much about the physical contact as the pleasure, but…
“Yeah. You’re pretty handy with a knife.
Looks like you took two of them out before you had to pull your gun.
” I eyed the knife he was holding, wondering if the change in subject would be enough to stop him from shutting down—I wasn’t sure I was ready to lose the little glimpse of him I was seeing behind his mask.
That smile on his face had been gorgeous, and so rare.
“I kind of have to be.” He was turning from me as he spoke, flipping the blade in the air and catching it by the handle. “Before I joined the Order, we spent more time without bullets than with them.”
He froze as he said it, missing the knife as he tossed it again. A low hiss tore from his lips when the blade cut into his palm.
I was pretty sure Aubrey had noticed the same thing as me.
We.
We .
He said we , and I watched all the life drain out of his body at the syllable.
He said we , and it made me wonder if part of the reason those pieces were hidden so deep was because they’d died with someone else.
If the reason he wanted me to fuck him so hard was because another man had left him hollow and he was chasing a ghost.
I didn’t like it.
My movements were slow and deliberate as I leaned down and picked up the knife he’d dropped.
When I circled him, Aubrey’s eyes were wide, and his cheeks were a little flushed.
I could see him scrambling to rebuild the walls he’d so carefully constructed, but for the first time, I could really see their cracks running all along his skin in the shape of the word he’d accidentally let slip.
And I watched them nearly crumble when I turned his blade in my hand and ran my finger along the fresh blood he’d left behind.
“Phoenix, don’t.” He knew what I was going to ask, and I knew there was no world where the question wasn’t going to leave my lips.
“Who exactly is we?”